18 August 2015

Smoking and obesity; anxiety and sirens

The UK has seen an onslaught against tobacco smoking. At the same time cases of diabetes are soaring, such that 'diabetes medication now accounts for 10% of the NHS [National Health Service] drugs bill'. Research appears to show that people who give up smoking put on weight.

By doing everything possible to suppress smoking has the UK Government unwittingly encouraged obesity and diabetes? Do the social costs of more obesity and diabetes outweigh the benefits of less smoking? I have no idea, but the important point is how little it is in anybody's interests to answer these questions and use their answers to influence government policy. With smoking the government has had an easy ride: 'everybody knows' that smoking is bad for you, just like 'everybody knows' that taking illegal drugs is bad for you, as is drinking alcohol. You see where I am going here: road traffic kills 1.24 million people annually worldwide, but there are benefits to it as well as costs, as there are for drinking, taking illegal drugs and, yes, smoking, especially, but not only, insofar as people who are denied the opportunity of smoking then may be more likely to be become obese and diabetic. These costs aren't easy to calculate of course, but government has created an environment in which nobody has an interest in doing those calculations. Instead, seeing that smoking directly and obviously causes some diseases, it reacts in the Pavlovian, short-term, one-size-fits-all manner that it, in common with other governments, adopts when they encounter the symptom of a problem. So now, in England: 'work smoking rooms and areas are no
longer permitted. All smokers must take their smoke breaks outside.' I've no doubt that rates of lung cancer and other diseases directly related to smoking have fallen as a result. But, as well as the costs to freedoms of the campaign against smoking, there are also the indirect costs to physical health, possibly taking the shape of increased rates of obesity and diabetes. The cancer specialists, and the well-meaning (though perhaps hysterical and self-righteous) anti-smoking lobby have no incentive or capacity to see whether smoking bans help or damage the overall health of people. Nor, under the current policymaking regime, are there any incentives for others to do so. And smokers are an easy target. Car drivers not so much.

We see the same in the area of mental health. The small city in which I currently live is blighted, maybe 20 or 30 times in every 24-hour period, by emergency vehicle sirens. Designed to create alarm and panic, that is what they do, to thousands of people, day and night. I have no doubt that these sirens shave a few seconds off the average journey time of the police, fire and ambulance vehicles. And those few seconds, might, on occasion, make the difference between life and death. But has anybody looked at the costs in terms of mental health of these sirens? It's no surprise that urban living is 'found to raise the risk of anxiety disorders and mood disorders by 21% and 39% respectively'. Physical health too: we may well be at the point where, as well as their reducing the quality of life of thousands of citizens every day, these sirens create more accidents than they help ameliorate by disturbing sleep patterns and inducing panicky responses in other road users and members of the public. Again, under the current policymaking regime, it's in nobody's interests to find out.

If government is to intervene in matters of health, it must look at the overall physical and mental health of its citizens. There have been, and no doubt still are, areas in which relationships between cause and effect are easy to identify. Provision of sanitation for instance, is clearly beneficial. I'd also support bans on smoking in all areas where there will be children and adults who don't choose to be exposed to the fumes. (That would be on aesthetic as well as health grounds.) But society is complex, as are the human body and mind. Most scientific relationships aren't easy to identify; and they vary over space and they change with time. We need policies that allow for diverse, adaptive approaches and that target broad mental and physical health, rather than particular maladies.

I offer my suggestion in this essay, which applies the Social Policy Bond principle to health care. Briefly: governments would target for improvement the health of the population, as measured in Quality (or Disability) Adjusted Life Years. Bonds would be redeemed only after sustained periods of improved health. A bond regime would reward the most efficient ways of improving health by channelling society's scarce resources into the areas where they could do the most good. Unlike today's healthcare systems, it wouldn't assume that a one-size-fits-all approach, based on fossilised science, is good enough for everybody, for all time.

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Social Policy Bonds

See the Social Policy Bonds website for overviews and links to articles, papers, news and more about Social Policy Bonds. Click on the image below to download a 2400-word article, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.

Social Policy Bonds in 2400 words

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Social Policy Bonds in the media

9 October 2015: An article by Greg Bearup on the genesis of the Social Policy Bond idea, and application of a version of it in Australia appears in the Weekend Australian Magazine. (The article can also be downloaded as a pdf from here.)

3 May 2012: An audio talk by Nobel Prize winner Professor Robert Shiller at the London School of Economics, in which Social Policy Bonds are briefly mentioned, is available here.